Pentagon wants $500M to get data to manage F-35 parts
29 Apr 2022 VALERIE INSINNA
"WASHINGTON: The F-35 program office wants $500 million so that it can harness technical data that will make it easier for the military services to manage F-35 spare parts instead of having to rely on prime contractor Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s F-35 program executive said today.
In order for the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy to set up an organic supply chain, the services need “provisioning and cataloging data” associated with various parts, Lt. Gen. Eric Fick told lawmakers at a House Armed Services readiness subcommittee hearing.
“We have the rights to that data. It’s not a matter of data rights, it’s matter of data delivery — and being able to have that data delivered is going to cost money,” he said. “And that money is going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of about half a billion dollars, divided amongst the services.”
Fick said the Pentagon has “struggled” to find funding that would allow that data delivery to happen en masse, and is instead working with the individual manufacturers of various components to try to secure that data “at low or no cost.”
In a statement to Breaking Defense, Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Heidi Fields said the company provides all required data rights to the government as contractually required....
...The debate on F-35 technical data rights have been a sticking point in negotiations between the Pentagon and Lockheed in recent years, as the department has shifted its focus to lowering the sustainment cost of the aircraft. When the F-35 program was conceptualized more than two decades ago, it was structured under a “Total System Performance Responsibility” approach that gave Lockheed an unprecedented amount of power to manage the sustainment of the aircraft.
“As a result, the government did not procure technical data that the government could eventually use, as needed and depending upon the circumstances, to promote vendor competition and increase government control over specific elements of sustainment,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report on F-35 sustainment released today....
...During the hearing, Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., asked Diana Maurer — who authored the GAO report — whether obligating the $500 million for data delivery would “be an investment that would show a good rate of return for the taxpayer?”
“I think there’s the potential for doing that,” she said, adding that during interviews with the GAO, F-35 maintainers often expressed frustrations over the limited information provided when trying to understand whether to replace a part and how best to accomplish the task.
“What tool do we use? How do I replace it? What tool do we use to put it back on? Those are the kinds of specific levels of information that’s part of technical data,” said Maurer."
