Podcast: Inside The Tradeoffs That Created The F-35

Jen DiMascio:

Hello and welcome to the Check 6 Podcast. We're here today to talk about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which has a complicated history of development and a complicated picture of success. It cost more than $400 billion to develop and, after decades of development, it has just completed the testing it needed to get a Pentagon decision on entering full-rate production. At the same time, 18 of the world's militaries have signed on to buy it, and they've produced, geez, almost a thousand of the aircraft.

This has been the story of the F 35, gaining praise for its embrace of new technologies and software, and then being hamstrung by technological glitches and redesigns and criticized for growing development, operation and sustainment costs. But the absolute success of selling this vision to the U.S., to Congress, and to the US' allies is clear. I'm Jen DiMascio, the Executive Editor for Defense and Space, and I'm joined today by Executive Editor for Business, Michael Bruno, and one of the key former officials at Lockheed Martin that made this story possible. Tom Burbage, who was the executive vice president and general manager of the F-35 program for its first 10 years. Tom recently wrote F-35: The Inside Story of the Lightning II with Betsy Clark, Adrian Pitman and David Poyer, and we're thrilled to have him join us today.

You talk in the book about getting program managers and chief engineers together to give a 15-minute presentation with this question in mind: “If you were about to be awarded the most challenging fighter development program in history, what would you take into consideration?” What lessons did you get from those presentations and how did it shape your management of the F-35?

Tom Burbage:

Well, that was early on. There's a period of time after you submit your proposal, and they're very extensive proposals. I think ours was on the order of 25,000 pages and they're shredded out and they go to different people to evaluate, and then there's similar parts of the competing proposals are evaluated by the same people and eventually there'll be a score. While that's going on, you're in a bit of a limbo period for a couple of months awaiting for the contract to be awarded. So, we decided to try and use that period constructively and get ourselves ready.

Now, we had a huge human resource ramp should we be lucky enough to win whenever the contract would be awarded, but I wanted to have the vision and where do we think we needed to go from a culture standpoint, want to have all those things kind of well discussed among the core team that was in place whil e we were waiting for this to be announced. One of the first things we did was I contacted the people who been the program managers of all the major development programs in the last 10 or 15 years. It was the B2, the F22, the Eurofighter, every airplane I could think of.

I invited him to come to Fort Worth for a two-day seminar, and that was the fundamental question, the one you just said, is if you were sitting where we're sitting and you just won this somewhat undefined in terms of total integrated technologies and a lot of requirements yet to be worked out there, requirements are sometimes even balance to allow the proposals to be evaluated on the same basis. In other words, this is how many test airplanes you get. Those kinds of things are set as prerequisites, and if that's not the program that you think you need to do to execute later, you make those adjustments after you win.

That's the normal process. We thought we would do this, and I didn't know if anybody would come. It was in Fort Worth, it was down at the Worthington Hotel. We set it up to be fun. We had the High Marshal, High Sheriff of Worthington was one of my deputies who would find people for speaking out of

turn or being obnoxious about a point, and then we would use that to start the bar process in the evening. We got a lot of good lessons out of it. There's one common lesson across all of them, and that was that at about the two-year point, your original planning will be overcome by risk that's matured that you hadn't anticipated in the technology development area, by human resource challenges on getting the staff you need to execute to the schedule that you proposed.

There'll be all kinds of things that will happen in the first two years, and if it's possible, of course it isn't, if it's possible, that's a really good time to re-baseline the program. That's not the way government programs work. You don't get to do that. You can have requirements changes, you can have the differences that were dictated by the ground rules can be modified and there can be an adjustment to the program to accommodate those changes. But calling a timeout and saying, "We've got some challenges we've got to take care of," that doesn't happen. It was really good for us to know that that's a dynamic we should be anticipating and be ready to react to it any way that we can to minimize the impact.

Jen DiMascio:

How did you, knowing that on the front end, then use that to your advantage going forward?

Tom Burbage:

Well, we set up a set of inflection points. Nobody knows exactly how these programs are going to unfold. The normal process is if there's a competitive period, there's a proposal evaluation process, there's an announcement and then there's some time to get ready to actually start the contract. Remember this contract was awarded about six weeks after 9/11. It was October 26, 2001. The announcement announcing Lockheed Martin as the winner was on a Friday after the market closed. The contract was unilaterally signed that night. We didn't even know the contract had really been signed.

So that normal process of two or three months to get ready for the contract and get your hiring started, the gun had gone off and we came back to work on Monday. We were scrambling to start with, but I think the insight into what these other programs had seen, and there's a lot of similarities, somebody, I think Dan Tell, the former CEO of Lockheed before they were Lockheed Martin always said there's never a new reason for a program to having problems. Programs have problems based on the same issues that develop as you're going through the process of giving birth to the project.

I think we were able to sort of tailor our scheduling to have a heightened sense of awareness that if we start seeing technology risk appear that we hadn't anticipated to really understand that and try to get on it as quick as possible so it doesn't evolve into something that's major. We also did another event to try to get the core team, but this time I had about maybe 50 people on the program, to get them engaged in visualizing the future. It wasn't going to be my vision, it had to be the vision of the team.

We did an interesting little project. We contacted Fast Company, and I made a mock-up of their cover. I asked if I could make a mock-up of their cover and post-date it 10 years in the future. This was 2001 and the date on the cover mock-up was 2011. I made some hypothetical titles for the chapters that were in the magazine. They told us we could do that without compromising their copyright. Made a big poster, took everybody down to a Mexican restaurant, ordered margaritas, put the poster on display in the center of a horseshoe shaped table and said, "Okay, now you folks are going to write the headlines that are going to be on that magazine when it's written in 10 years. What are those headlines going to say? Are they going to say that F-35 crashed and burned? Are they going to say the F-35 program is successful in ways that they hadn't been envisioned? What are the headlines that you want to generate because you're going to generate them whether you like it or not."

And so they spent a couple of hours and as the evening went on, it got louder and more raucous. We kind of developed a set of headlines that then later translated into a set of objectives for the program. We wanted to have a common culture, we wanted to have a common focus on where this all needed to go with the understanding it was probably going to be an unprecedented level of complexity.

Jen DiMascio:

What were you really reaching for in terms of technology? What do you see as the program's greatest technological achievements?

Tom Burbage:

The program was a consolidation of a number of earlier programs that were canceled and then integrated into a common set of requirements. The hope was that we could develop a family of airplanes that were closely related and get rid of some of these traditional issues of airplanes that couldn't talk to each other, of pilots that had to go through special training to go from one airplane to the next. If I could develop a family of airplanes that could operate in the environment that the program needed to operate in, I could make everything else common.

If you put the three versions of the F-35 on the tarmac and you blindfolded the pilots and you put them in the airplane, they should be exactly the same. You shouldn't even know which airplane you're in. If you come step outside and look at it, they're different because the Marine Corps one has to be able to land vertically. Th e Navy one has to be able to withstand the stresses of catapults and arresting gear. So, structurally they had to be different. There was almost a very naive sense, mostly driven I think by the media and by others that didn't really understand the fact that you had to have some structural differences that these airplanes would've massive commonality across the parts in the beginning where we would only make exceptions to a part if it was absolutely critical.

Then when you couple that with the fact that all of the sensors and the systems and the software are the same, then you have the new operating concept that really hasn't existed in the past. I think to get back to your question, what were the biggest breakthroughs?

One is the ejection system for the pilot on the airplane. As this was happening, as these requirements were unfolding, the pilot population suddenly went down to a hundred pounds on the low end and 140 on the high end, naked weight, and that's to accommodate the female light Asian male pilots that were going to now be part of the program. Historically, ejection seats have a much narrower weight restriction on the pilots because it's quite a rocket blast to get you out of an airplane, particularly if you're not moving, if the airplane's on the ground.

You don't want to have a rocket blast that's going to hurt the small person or leave the big guy in the airplane. You have to have an adjustable rocket capability. Each pilot's individual demographics have to influence that rocket blast that comes out of there. Additionally, the smaller pilots, because they're less muscular in their neck, if you eject at high speeds, you have a wind blast issue that you hadn't had with the heavier pilot. All that led to a pilot dynamic. There's one especially interesting one, was the Stovall airplane, the Marine Corps version. If it was in a hover fairly close to the ground and there's one accident that you can imagine but hopefully will never happen, and that's that the shaft that connects the fan and the engine together should sever for some reason.

The airplane tumbles too fast for a human to react, so there's auto eject. The airplane system senses that when you're in that mode. It shoots you out of the airplane. The pilots weren't really happy about that concept in the beginning because there's always the fear that that will happen when it's not

commanded and things like that. But that's the way that airplane works. The ejection system was a very complicated one.

The other one that was almost a no go was we had to take two of the three airplanes to sea. If you have followed the development and the maintenance of stealthy airplanes, starting with the F-117, and then the B-2, and then the F-22, if you have a repair to do on those airplanes, you have to go into a humidity controlled, temperature-controlled environment.

It's a complicated repair process with multiple finishes that have to go on the airplane. That doesn't exist at sea. So if you have two of these three versions that are operating at sea in an open air salt water environment, we had to come up with a different way of doing the stealth features of the airplane. And act of God, coincidentally about this time, the whole composite industry was being modernized and we could suddenly go to complex curved skins for the airplane. You can do a whole lot more with composite skins than you can do with metal skins when it comes to stealth.

We were able to basically change that paradigm and it's been very successful in terms of the airplane being operated at sea.

Michael Bruno:

Tom, I want to ask you a couple of questions that are related to the industrial base and what got me thinking about this was the fact that the F-35 being revolutionary in many, many, many ways, one of which was its approach to manufacturing. It wasn't just that the customers were going to be international, but that manufacturing was going to be directly international from the get-go. And so here we are quarter of a century later in the real process of that. I'm kind of curious as to how do you think that went? Do you think looking back now and everything we've seen, was that the right approach? Or should it had stayed a US program by manufacturing with just simply international sales?

Tom Burbage:

The concept of the program was really built back in the original days of acquisition reform and there was a lot of initiatives, some of which have died on the vine and gone away by now. I remember the first one was that all proposals would be no more than a hundred pages. Like I said, ours was 25,000, so that one didn't last too long. But there were others. One of them was that they wanted to have a limited number of allies that fly and fight with us join the program early, and that was so that we could have better burden sharing when it came to long-term combat or peacekeeping operations.

The U.S. doesn't have to be the first and only country that can go into a combat and then the rest of the boys and the girls come in later when the threat's beaten down. They want everybody to have a bigger role, particularly from a financial perspective in conducting combat and peacekeeping operations going forward. We had that. Then to incentivize the international partners, the nine countries that had been selected to be part of the project, eight counting the U.S., they would want each of those countries to contribute a fairly significant amount of funding. The UK was the top tier country after the US and the US and the UK were already partnered building a replacement for the Harrier.

That effort was terminated and rolled in to now be part of F-35. The second two countries in terms of dollars were the Netherlands and Italy and they were called level two partners, and they would contribute about a billion dollars to the development of the airplane over time. They also had the choice of buying some early operational test airplanes and testing as part of the joint force or whatever else they want to do with that. The other countries, the other five nations, were level three, much lower level of investment, fewer people in the office but still buying. That would allow us to buy in bulk, so all

of those airplanes would be bought in the same production lots as opposed to buying through the foreign military sales process where you buy later.

A number of the international partners also were aging out their air forces, so they wanted to get the airplanes on the same schedule the U.S. did. All that led to a set of incentives that said, "Your industry can compete on the program provided they can provide best value." Nobody wants to pay a premium for your industry's inability to build these parts, but everybody wants to build. I called it the miracle of the fishes. It's a pretty small airplane and everybody wants to build 51% of it. We had the prime contractors, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, we had them develop a second source for their major pieces in the international world and then populate their supply chains.

You're absolutely right that the capability of the industrial base at that time, both in the U.S. and the international world, was not really capable of building parts for an F-35. The level of precision that you have to maintain of manufacturing those parts is way beyond what the normal capacity of the industry was, particularly when you got into some of the smaller companies. One of the things we had to do was get a commitment from companies and nations. I think I spent more time with the Minister of Industry and Trade than I did with the Ministry of Defense in the first five years of the program trying to convince them that they would get work on the program and they would be able to do it.

If you went into Fort Worth in the early days, we were building the F-16, the center body for the F-22 and then the F-35, all three in the same factory. You could see very clearly the differences in manufacturing technology for those three generations of airplanes. The F-35 was basically built on a computer in a three-dimensional database that was shared with the supporting supply chain. We could actually clear up differences, we could pre-made major assemblies before they even left their factories. We maintained all the factories within plus or minus two degrees of each other, so we wouldn't get any thermal mismatches when they finally came in.

There's a lot of things that we did, but the industry had to step up and make investments. The nations had to step up and make investments. I think we opened five world-class, new factories in the same year, one in Norway, one in Denmark, one in Turkey. They were just being built to support the F-35.

Michael Bruno:

Well, let me ask if I can, Tom, I'll ask the question again and you can take it from there. We were talking about the internationalization of the industrial policy approach to this program and I wanted to ask you if you think it's worth doing again. Were you happy with the way it's turned out? And what has me asking you that question is because Tom Enders, the former head of Airbus, famously said he never wanted to do an A400 program again, partly because of manufacturing challenges, but partly because the political cost of trying to make it work were just maybe not worth the investment. So what do you think? Is the model... Did it work? Did it work at F-35 only and shouldn't be tried again or should we try this model again for many other programs?

Tom Burbage:

I don't think you'll incentivize nations to contribute upfront development money and be part of the requirements' definition without having some industrial payback. In the past, that's been labeled offset. When you buy through the foreign military sales, it's offset and it tends to be things not directly related to the airplane. There was a desire on the participating nations to actually improve their industrial base as it relates to aerospace and defense manufacturing. There were incentives offered and there were incentives desired to be part of the project to basically modernize their capability. Is that worth it or not?

It is hard. It's very hard to do and it is hard to keep everybody in the game. There are some small mom-and-pop shops, so to speak, in some of the smaller countries. When you look at Norway and Denmark, they have a fairly well established F-16 based industrial base, but it's small. If you look at Australia, they're machine shops in very quiet places that are run by families and some of them didn't survive. It was somewhat brutal on some of the ones that wanted to participate. But in general, I don't think you could have had the political support to make the contributions to be a partner in developing it or maintain the relationships to operate as an allied composite air force, which was the objective they were trying to go to.

So there's definitely a cost associated with it. There are definitely some things involved in it that you have to be very careful of because you can add a lot of costs, not due to the inefficiencies of the manufacturer, but due to the fact that you're moving stuff around the planet. Sometimes, I'll give you an example that people don't necessarily think about, in Australia, because of environmental concerns, they had no way to do the shot cleaning and the processing on metal parts. They could build the metal parts, but they couldn't finish the process. They wound up shipping parts back to Los Angeles to get that process done and then shipping them back to Australia to get finished.

Well that cost is carried through to the ultimate buyer, so all those things had to be analyzed and stopped wherever they could to get some efficient processes in place. In general, and I'll tell you another good example, one of the best suppliers on the program was Turkey. When Turkey was moved out of the program for political reasons, we lost a really important part of that base because they were the second source on the center fuselage, which has as many man-hours in it as a full F16. It was a big piece of structure and they were doing exceptionally good work.

I spent quite a bit of time with the Turkish industry guys over there and it's an amazing... They have tax benefits, they have cost benefits. Our problem was to not give them so much work because they could earn it if it was just based on earning, but we had to have some to share with others. The industrial guarantee with all the partner countries was it would be direct work on the program. It would not be hams from farms and stuff like that, which have tended to be the offset type stuff. It had to be direct work F35.

Michael Bruno:

A quick follow up on Turkey and then I'll give it back to Jen, but so great example there where major part of manufacturing had to get moved for political reasons. Was there a plan for that kind of thing somewhere in a back office in Fort Worth for that to ever happen? Or was it so unique that there was no plan for it? Because it does seem to some people that that setback that occurred from moving work out of Turkey to Germany or wherever, that set the program back. Was that just not able to be planned for?

Tom Burbage:

Well, you can't over-plan capacity. You try to bring capacity on as the program's ramping and the ramp on the program was another whole story. Basically, we had two inflection points in the program. One was about 2004 when we were building the A version, the Air Force version, and we were projecting what the weight of the B would be. There's not enough engineers in the world to build three in parallel and you don't want to do that anyway because then you don't get to take advantage of your learning from the first to the second. So we built one A model and we were going to fly that, and it wound up being a production prototype and a very valuable asset, but only one.

So the way the budget process was set up, there was two major budget lines in the US budget and that budget was augmented by funds that came in from all the partners. There was a development line and there was a production line. If you remember in the early days, the idea was to ramp production fairly

quickly and get the economies of scale and then if there were changes that needed to be made, we'd make those downstream. Turns out to be a flawed philosophy in most people's minds. When we had to go and do the additional engineering to get the weight out of the B model from 2004 to about 2005 and a half, that was paid for by taking money out of the production line.

There was no additional money added into the F-35 program. In fact, in several years they gave hundreds of millions of dollars back because they couldn't spend them. What that did for the manufacturing base is it just started and then stopped. I went to several manufacturers that had brand new multimillion dollar machines and bubble wrap in their parking lot and they now own those things because we told them we're going to have a ramp that goes like this and now we have a ramp that goes like this. And so there was a lot of pain and agony in the early days.

Now since then, of course once you get over the hump and you actually start building them, it's a different story. The language is interesting too. Jen, in your opening remarks you mentioned that we finally got approval for full rate production. Well last year, they delivered 160 airplanes. If you think about it, that's one airplane every two manufacturing days. We haven't built airplanes since World War II at anywhere close to that rate. What's full rate production going to be?

Then you get to the point where your capacity of that footprint, there is a second final assembly facility in Italy, I'm sure you're probably aware of that, that the Italians decided to invest in building a facility as opposed to buying test airplanes. There's a third assembly line in Japan, so they're building just the Japanese airplanes. If you look at the capacity for that and now you look at all the other countries that have suddenly jumped in with the Ukraine situation, you could easily run your capacity up it. But now adding new capacity in terms of a new plant is timely, or untimely is the right word, I guess. It doesn't happen very fast.

There is capacity in the Lockheed Marietta facility where we built the F-22. Right now, it's building the wing for the F-35. So there are pockets of capacity, but none of it is coordinated or tooled like the Fort Worth facility is. So suddenly going up in rate again. Right now, I think they're going down in rate slightly because of supply chain challenges and then hopefully they'll turn that around and go back up and rate. There'll be about a 1,000 F-35s out there flying at the end of this year, which if you think about it's a lot of airplanes and production rates are as high as they've been in a long, long time for our industry.

We're all anxious to see how somebody's going to define full rate production.

Jen DiMascio:

Well, that is a Pentagon definition, but it's also a signpost. It's really the end of the test and evaluation phase, which has been held up by a number of challenges that the program faces. I was hoping we could talk a little bit about one of the trade-offs that you had to make for a structural redesign, which I think was moving money out of mission system software development. That has seemed to have led to a lot of ongoing software issues for the program. I'm wondering if you can talk about why you made that decision to change funding and what it's meant for the program.

Tom Burbage:

There's a lot of analogies you could use on how you make hard choices, but flying close to the ground is a good one. Your priorities go against not hitting the ground, not necessarily some of the other things that you'd like to be doing. We were at the point where if we didn't resolve the weight issue on STOVL, the Marines were going to not reject the program. They wound being our strongest supporter. If I look back on it, I would say the B model for all of its challenges was what kept the program to the point

where it's today where all three variants are still viable and all three of them are receiving I think really good marks when they're operational in the fleet.

It wound up in retrospect looking backwards, always easier looking, being a really interesting part of the process. If we didn't fix the B model and fix it quick, it was on probation, we had a threat from the Secretary of Defense that he was going to cancel the B program and then all of a sudden, I don't don't know how you would've unbuckled and put it back together because you had supply chain commitments all around the world that were unique to that Stovall engine and things like that. The bottom line was we had to do something and you can't all of a sudden get... There are no management reserves on the program.

The management reserves are held by the government. So if you have a major disconnect and you need more funding, you go hat in hand and you ask for more funding and you'll get into the budget process and hopefully there'll be something that'll come in with the next budget that's approved. But there's not a lot of extra money floating around that you can put on a problem. That results in tough decisions being made. Do we delay some of the mission system software? We're having some challenges in there anyway. The way the software is developed is the individual sensors are developed in the labs of the contractor that's got that sensor. Northrop Grumman had the radar, BAE Systems had the electronic warfare system.

Those are being developed in a Zoom setting sort of. Then they come together in an integration lab and then once they have a level of integration, then they go into the flying lab. And so your software is to be developed through multiple complex stages. It wasn't that we took money away from them to fund the engineering for the B model. It was that we didn't have the money to keep ramping up their funds. We had to take those ramp up funds and divert them to get the engineering done.

It was an intentional move and it was supported by the government. It wasn't Lockheed Martin making these decisions in a vacuum. It was supported that the priority of the program had to get the B model fixed, which added about 18 months of engineering. During that 18 months, we should have been building a model 11 or 12 airplanes, we built one. Then we started back up with the B being the first test of the airplane. The original process was do the simplest version first, learn a lot. If you put the A and the B model on top of each other, the shadow on the ground's about the same. So that's the closest one from a configuration standpoint. Do the B model second and then the C model, the Navy didn't really want their airplane until a little bit later on, but the C model's going to have a bigger wing and bigger system and bigger gear.

That's going to be the most different one. Do that one last. That was the original plan. Then when the B model got threat threatened, we reversed the B and the A became BAC. That was a big deal. The pilots will tell you that that was a godsend because everything was moving so fast. Because they had time to now go back and optimize the weight of the structure, all three airplanes are better airplanes because of that, because we try to carry through those improvements across all three. They say you have to break the pencils of the engineers or you'll be changing things forever.

But if you give the engineers one last chance to go through one more time and iron out all the things that are causing some inefficiencies, they get a better configuration in the end. So yes, there was additional amount of money went into the airplane to do that. Bottom line is all three airplanes are a lot better. Now that we're further along, we can look backwards and say it wasn't that big of a hiccup, but at the time it was probably life-threatening.

Jen DiMascio:

Thanks. Well, I'm getting pinged by Guy, our podcast editor here, to wrap things up. Your response does... That whole incident does point to the issue of concurrency that we touched on earlier where you're making a lot of aircraft but they're not quite usable in the configuration that you want or that you're desiring. You're not meeting all of the requirements when you're producing the aircraft, and some of those have gone on to need to be retrofitted. So that has added cost to the program. How do you answer those critics who say concurrency was a mistake?

Tom Burbage:

I think it's a delicate line. That was the philosophy in the beginning. That was a directed, "We're going to do this in a concurrent manner." That's the way the program fundamentals were set up. There's a fine line that you walk. I mean in the old days, you'd build an airplane until it was ready to go and then you'd build it in quantities, but those timelines were a whole lot shorter than they are today. It's taken 20 years. The IOC, the initial operating capability for the US services was in the 15 to 18 years, 2015 to 2018, in those timeframes.

But yeah, it's trade-off on how concurrent can you be and achieve economies of commonality and scale, and then what are the changes you expect to see come in later on? I think personally my observation is most of the changes are from evolving requirements that weren't there when we started the program. A good example is the drag chute for the Norwegians that goes up between the tails. There may be some beneficial use of that real estate because real estate is very rare on this airplane, it's so densely packed. Or of a new weapon.

There's several new weapons mostly on the international side that were intended to be integrated later on. Hopefully, there's no modifications required to the weapons base to accommodate those. I think in the early days they have projections of how big those weapons are going to be and they add them into what's called the blob of bombs. That basically is the outer mold line of what has to fit into the weapons bay. Again, it's very tightly packed. Or the changes are in software.

One of the things they're looking at right now I know is they want to generate more power and that's not thrust to go faster. That's more power to drive some sensors and weapons that require more power. And it is hard. It's especially hard on the B model because you have a complicated engine arrangement there that's already doing a lot of things. Those are evolving requirements and one thing you never get rid of in this business is evolving requirements. You try to accommodate those evolving requirements with as little disruption to the airplane as you can, but that will drive you to some configuration differences.

If you want to take the older airplanes that don't have those changes in it and make them all compatible, then there's a repair process or modification process to bring those up to speed. I think I was just recently told about GAO report, which you probably have read that just recently came out on the sustainment side. It's always boggled my mind that we were spending a billion dollars a year in year one laying out the sustainment process for the F-35. It's based on commercial standards, it's based on a prime contractor having a major role.

Then over time the tribes, I like to call this Archipelago's Ecosystems and Tribes, kind of defines the F-35 program better than any other three words. But the tribes want to wrestle control out of joint upgrades and improvements and contractor-led stuff because they don't think they're going to get the priority they would get if they're running it all themselves. And slowly, that cost benefit starts eroding as you go through time. So hopefully they'll get it back.

My experience with the GAO is that their reports are usually accurate as of a certain date and their review process usually takes about six months and by the time it's read, many of the things have already

been addressed and corrected. And then you go through this negative press/social media cycle where you get in a defensive crouch and take on all comers for a couple of months. The program just meanwhile is back there, just proceeding on trying to solve all those problems. Not that they've solved them all.

I think it is a dynamic that's there. It's going to be there in every big program. Requirements change over time, threats change over time. You've got to be able to accommodate those without major changes to the airplane.

Jen DiMascio:

Next, Tom, since we have just a few minutes, I'm going to close out with one quick question. The U.S. is about to award a contract for a sixth-generation fighter. If you were about to win it, what are the top lessons from the F-35 program that you would take into consideration? But you only got a minute to answer this, not 15.

Tom Burbage:

I'd put a group of strategic thinkers and probably pull them out of the key slots that were on F-35 and then put them in a room and I'd say exactly what we asked that big group I mentioned in the beginning, "Hey, you just completed the big program, F-35. If you were sitting where we're sitting, given that some of the dynamics are different now because it's really more interoperability and computer controlled, internet node thinking, cyber's a big deal, what would you make sure you discussed and made part of the new program from your perspective?" There'll be lots of new things that will come beyond that, but at least take advantage of what we all went through and see if there's a way of doing it better.

Jen DiMascio:

Well, Tom Burbage, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you Michael Bruno and Guy Ferneyhough, our podcast editor. Also, thanks very much to our listeners for tuning into the Check 6 Podcast. Tune in again next week.