Donald Trump Just Went to War on the F-35 Stealth Fighter

Dave Majumdar

Security,

Would he cancel the program? 

President-elect Donald Trump has weighed in on Lockheed Martin’s tri-service F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program—promising that billions will be saved after he is formally inaugurated early next year. Trump did not say he would outright cancel the stealthy new single-engine fighter, but his language suggests that the nearly $400 billion program could—at a minimum—be severely truncated.

“The F-35 program and cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th,” President-elect Trump said in a Tweet early on Dec. 12.

Nor is this the first time Trump has called out the F-35 program. Earlier on Sunday, the future president denounced the stealth fighter and the people managing the effort. “Look at the F-35 program with the money, the hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump said during a Fox News interview on Sunday. “It’s out of control. And the people that are making these deals for the government, they should never be allowed to go to work for these companies. You know, they make a deal like that and two or three years later, you see them working for these companies that made the deal. They should have a lifetime restriction.”

Indeed, the F-35 program has faced cost growth and delays since the system development and  demonstration contract was awarded to Lockheed Martin in 2001. The initial operational capability (IOC) date for the U.S. Marines slipped from 2010 to 2015 while the Air Force and Navy IOC dates slipped to 2016 and 2018 respectively from the original target of 2012. And in the case of both the Air Force and Marine Corps—those services opted for a limited IOC using an interim Block 2B/3i configuration that only offers very limited combat capability to get the jet into operation as soon as possible. “These new dates represented a delay of 5 to 6 years from the program’s initial baseline dates,” reads an April 2016 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.