F-35 Sustainment Management Strategy

The largest acquisition program in the Department of Defense history is attempting to leverage aggressive procurement strategies. In September of 2001 the Department of Defense mandated Performance Based Logistics (PBL) model for future acquisition programs (ALGS) . The Joint Strike Fighter is the first Air System to implement this plan across the entire platform. Other military aircraft programs have successfully adopted the PBL concept but at the sub-system or component level. Acquisition programs such as aircraft modernization or component improving initiatives have proven to be beneficial to the Government. However, introducing PBL with the complexity,  scale, and evolutionary acquisition strategy of the F-35 program has resulted in frustration to multiple U.S. and foreign participants. 

Performance Based Logistics is a life cycle sustainment plan that reduces the total ownership cost by finding efficiencies by minimizing the logistics footprint. For example, sharing resources between all organizations that operate the same type of aircraft at a particular location would eliminate excess. Take this approach across an enterprise and you find additional optimization at the theater or even global level. Sharing or "pooling" assets such as spare parts and support equipment as a global sustainment level requires a well defined resource management plan. Key to such a plan would be stability in the aircraft design, system maturity, and performance reliability. Unfortunately,  the F-35 has yet to achieve any of these key attributes.

To date more than 100 aircraft have been delivered to the US Air Force, US Marine Corp, Australia, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands prior to completion of Operational Test and Evaluation. This is not by accident,  the F-35 procurement plan was designed as a phased approach with incremental development at each step. Each phase introduces additional capability essentially freezing the production configuration and sustainment solutions as defined in the F-35 Air System Block Plan ( Lockheed Martin).  More traditional aircraft acquisition programs would complete Developmental Testing before transitioning to capabilities validation through Operational Testing followed by formal entry into Full Rate Production and delivering a mature, stable system to the first operational organization. The F-35 program is performing all these activates simultaneously which compounds the sustainment instability. 

The F-35 Spares Management Plan relies heavily on modeling and simulation to predict the spares allocation requirements. Along with other complex algorithms, each participant established a Performance Based Agreement with Lockheed Martin, identifying the specific capabilities for that particular Service. This and other factors such as primary mission, number of aircraft assigned, Number of sorties, flight hours, and aircraft availability requirements all feed the model which establishes the required spares allocation for sustainment support. The accuracy of this model is dependent on Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) data for validation. The F-35 program established an R&M maturity threshold of 50,000 flight hours per variant (F-35A, F-35B, F-35C) or 200,000 across all variants.  Currently the total flight hours across all variants is approximately 15,000.  

Based on growing concern on 28 October, 2013, the Under Secretary of Defense, Frank Kendall signed an Acquisition Decision Memorandum directing a review of the factors affecting program readiness. In a follow-on memorandum dated 29 May, 2014, Mr. Kendall highlighted the R&M criteria and established a reliability improvement program to influence changes to achieve performance objectives. This enables R&M engineering and analysts to target improvements in 2015 which is well ahead of the 50,000 or 2000,000 flight hour threshold. This will be very challenging and may introduces new risks. Consider the ripple effect of driving changes to a component based on minimal data. This could negatively impact production upstream at the vender level as they too are building capability based on the current procurement plan. Not to mention the impacts if the analysis that drove the change request is incorrect.  

Supply Chain Management under Performance Based Logistics strives to deliver the right part to the right place at the right time to minimize logistics footprint and is heavily dependent on accurate utilization data. Developing a Spares Management Plan based on predicted performance is extremely challenging. Using substantiated R&M data to validate the modeling and simulation tools is key to effective PBL strategy. Instability in aircraft design, system maturity, and performance reliability negatively impact an acquisition program. Each of these factors are even more programmatic under concurrent development programs like the F-35.