Lehman: No JSF competition is 'Alice in Wonderland'

As Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1987, John Lehman was certainly never one to shy away from a fight — whether it’s standing up to enemies overseas or battling bureaucracy at home. When it comes to the Joint Strike Fighter, he’s just as vocal and has become an influential proponent of continued engine competition on the fighter that will become the backbone of the U.S. fleet in coming years, with 5,000 to 6,000 planes expected to be fielded between the U.S. and its allies. In the video link below, Lehman again makes the case for a head-to-head competition between the GE-Rolls Royce F136 engine and the one being built by Pratt & Whitney — citing the dangerous effects that a lack of competition had on the F-15 and F-14 fighter fleets. As he bluntly says in the video, the idea of bureaucrats getting defense procurement costs down without competition is “a pipe dream.”

As Lehman wrote in “The wrong way to build the F-35,” an opinion piece published in October: “Nowhere was the wisdom of annual competition better demonstrated than in the establishment of an alternative engine for the Air Force F-15 and F-16 fighters. Despite strong opposition from his own bureaucracy, Air Force Secretary Verne Orr, fed up with constant cost growth and repeated grounding of all fighters due to flaws in the sole-source engine, forced through the qualification of an alternative engine and contractor, and had the two compete every year thereafter. The benefits from this annual competition came swiftly, were many and have endured. There was steady improvement in reliability, performance and fuel economy and a dramatic drop in engine-caused accidents. By the second year of full competition, the cost per engine had dropped 20 percent. The Navy soon followed suit in choosing an alternative engine for the F-14 with similar benefits….With the F-35 scheduled to replace all other US fighters except the F-22, it is hardly wise to risk the same kind of fleet grounding that afflicted the F-14 and F-15 when they depended on a sole-source engine supplier.”

History lesson: As Lehman points out, one of the most compelling arguments in favor of engine competition is the lesson learned from the 1980s and ’90s — known in military circles as “The Great Engine War.” At the time, problems developed from a sole-sourced Pratt & Whitney engine being used to power the F-15 fleet. The military eventually called for a second engine to be developed and established a head-to-head competition for its new F-16s. It resulted in GE developing what later became the dominant engine of the entire fleet, with GE’s alternative engine today powering every combat F-16 in the active U.S. Air Force.

Added Lehman in his opinion piece: “I’m quite unused to defending the actions of Congress, but when it comes to contracting the production of the new F-35 fighter, the Defense committees are right and the Pentagon is wrong.”

Learn more in these GE Reports stories:
* “GE and the Joint Strike Fighter: Facts vs. Myths Part 2”
* “GE and the Joint Strike Fighter: Facts vs. myths”
* “Fixed price offer will slash Joint Strike Fighter costs”
* “GE & the Joint Strike Fighter: Let the best engine win”
* “Gen. Hough: JSF engine competition ‘never happened’”
* “House backs Joint Strike Fighter engine competition”