With the Senate poised to vote on whether to continue funding the F136 engine for the Joint Strike Fighter, the way in which competition can dramatically reduce costs, improve performance, and lead to fewer groundings and accidents has been at the forefront. But the large fighter engine industrial base in the U.S. also hangs in the balance.
Today’s defense industry has not only become more concentrated due to consolidation in recent years, but GE’s current fighter engine programs (F110 and F414) will soon wind down. The result will be insufficient funding/workload to sustain GE’s fighter engine design capability if the JSF F136 is terminated, as there is no other program planned or in development in the near term that would allow GE to keep its large fighter engine team together.
If this happens, GE will continue to operate and build onto a world-leading commercial jet engine business for decades to come — for example, GE Aviation today is engaged in the most aggressive technology investments for new commercial engines in its history. However, military fighter engines require completely unique engine architectures and technologies such as special air inlets and afterburners. Without F136 funding, GE will not be able to keep an engineering team together in order to produce these types of large fighter engines in the future.
Studies from 2006 and 2008 by the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) – the DoD entity that assesses industrial base issues — echo this concern, highlighting the probability of serious impact on the large fighter engine industrial base if the F136 engine was terminated.
As the Heritage Foundation pointed out, the industrial base issue is also a key component of the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009. That law changed how the Pentagon buys major weapons systems by requiring it to use competition to increase quality and reduce costs. “This life cycle management process keeps pressure on the manufacturers for a high-quality, lower-cost product while maintaining a critical engineering industrial base that will be needed in the future,” they write.
In a separate report, the Heritage Foundation also specifically says that the GE-Rolls Royce F136 “engine program would also help to ensure that the U.S. maintains engine competition for future fighter programs including potential sixth-generation aircraft.”
A highly detailed third report from the Heritage Foundation in 2009, “Maintaining the Superiority of America’s Defense Industrial Base,” underscores that “the critical workforce ingredients in sustaining an industrial base capable of building next-generation systems are specialized design, engineering, and manufacturing skills. … While the manufacturing workforce alone should not dictate congressional defense acquisition decisions, the potential defense ‘brain drain’ must be considered when Congress determines whether or not to permanently shut down major production lines — particularly shipbuilding and aerospace. … Given the inherently unpredictable nature of the international security system, Congress must take a long-term perspective for defense planning.”
Even a 2-3 year gap in a program, they note, can “threaten the supply base and truncate the next generation of aerospace designers, engineers, and manufacturers.”
* Read more JSF stories on GE Reports
* Read “Setting the Record Straight: GE, the JSF and Costs” on GE Reports
* Learn more about the F-16 “Great Engine War”
SOURCE
