F-35: $2T in 'generational wealth' the military had no right to spend

On October 26, 2001, Jim Roche, the then Secretary of the Air Force, stood behind the podium in the Pentagon briefing room to announce that Lockheed Martin had won the competition to build the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Joining him on the stage, were Edward Aldridge, the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, and Gordon England, the Secretary of the Navy.

All three took turns at the microphone to tout the Joint Strike Fighter’s anticipated virtues. “The Joint Strike Fighter is a family of highly common, lethal, survivable, supportable, and affordable next generation multirole strike fighter aircraft,” said Aldridge.

All these claims have proven to be spurious to a greater or lesser extent in subsequent years as the F-35 program limped through a seemingly endless development process, but none so much as the “affordable” claim. At the time of the announcement, the F-35 was supposed to enter active service in 2008 and the program was expected to cost $200 billion.

Nearly 23 years later, the F-35 is officially the most expensive weapon program in history clocking with an anticipated total program cost of $2 trillion and engineers continue to struggle to make the jet work properly with development and procurement costs having more than doubled.

The three men who made that announcement were nearing the end of their long careers. Aldridge retired from the government in 2003 and went on to serve on the board of Lockheed Martin. Jim Roche left the Pentagon in 2005 and became the director of Orbital ATK. Gordon England eventually became deputy secretary of defense before retiring in 2009.

Through their Joint Strike Fighter decision, these three men committed the United States to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for a program that has proven to be an unmitigated disaster. They created a massive financial obligation that future generations of taxpayers must bear, without the much-touted program having produced any of the actual security benefits it was supposed to bring to the U.S. armed forces.

By the time the program’s conceptual flaws became obvious, all three individuals had long since left government service and it was left to an entire generation of their successors to salvage something from the mess they left behind.

It is that last point the individuals who temporarily occupy offices vested with such authorities need to keep front of mind. They have the power to commit future generations to truly massive amounts of spending. All three of the prime F-35 decision-makers were born in the 1930s making them part of the Silent Generation. Generation X, the Millennials, and Gens Z and Alpha must bear the burden of their decisions.

The power to spend such generational wealth should not be wielded in a perfunctory manner. Those with the power of the pen should be far less credulous when people pitch them on pie-in-the-sky programs based on unproven technological promises and assumptions.

Amid growing concerns over the perceived threat of great power conflict and nuclear confrontation, the national security establishment and policymakers have relied upon misguided lessons about how the U.S. maintained the peace and won the Cold War to resurrect the hubristic reliance on expensive technology to provide, at least on paper, a military superiority that we hope will preserve the preeminence of our military.

Prominent figures in Congress have called for a “generational” investment in U.S. defense spending that would see defense spending rise to 5% of GDP by 2030 with little regard for those who will ultimately have to foot the bill. While it is hypothetically possible to reach this goal it does not mean we should.

Take for example the decision to modernize all three legs of the nuclear triad simultaneously, a monumental (and likely self-defeating) undertaking estimated to cost a staggering $1.7 trillion over the coming decades, a figure that mirrors the totality of student debt!

The issue is that the individual components of this effort have proven to be unanticipatedly more complicated and expensive than originally projected. For instance, the Air Force’s Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program has overrun its budget projection by more than 81%.

Regardless of policymakers’ justification for this irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars, there has been a complete lack of accountability within the defense procurement apparatus. The forebears of tomorrow are failing to use this moment as an opportunity to avoid repeating the mistakes of the F-35, Littoral Combat Ship, Ford-class Aircraft Carrier, and Zumwalt-class Destroyer programs all while undermining the ability of the average American to achieve the quintessential goals of the American Dream.

Pouring funds into the abyss, or simply the pockets of defense executives who then initiate stock buy-backs while enjoying record profits for the defense industry quarter after quarter, ensure that future generations will be forced to make sacrifices on other national security priorities like infrastructure, the power grid, national debt, student debt, the economy, education, supply chain resiliency, healthcare and more to comply with the commitments made by our political leaders who are consigning future generations to insurmountable debt in the name of an illusory concept of “national security.”

Since the year 2000, the U.S. increased its defense spending by at least 48% when adjusting for inflation. So, how can it be that after ending the longest wars in our nation’s history, and already spending more on our national security than at peak times during the Vietnam and Korean Wars, we still need to spend more money on defense?

The security and economic well-being of future generations will not be manifested through the myopic decisions to increase defense spending in the name of more security. Continuing to print money for the development of new weapons programs that will likely be outmoded by the time they are ready for a hypothetical war will keep weapons contractors and shareholders happy, but it will do little to actually make Americans or our allies safer amidst a rapidly changing world.

It is time for policymakers in Washington to realize that there is more that goes into our national security than just spending more money on the military, and devote real time and energy to a realistic and sustainable strategy that builds confidence, readiness and stability into our national security.