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How much does the F-35 actually cost?

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How much does the F-35 actually cost?

Speaking Security Newsletter | Congressional Candidate Advisory Note 26 | 16 July 2020

Stephen Semler
Jul 16, 2020
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How much does the F-35 actually cost?

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In short: the F-35 costs way more than advertised.

Also check out SPRI’s latest policy paper on demilitarizing the police by ending/cleaning up after the 1033 program (article | tweet). Sharing it would be very much appreciated!

And I was on a webinar hosted by City University of London, LSE Ideas, and INCT-INEU. Speakers are Daniel Bessner and yours truly (moderated by Inderjeet Parmar, one my favorite scholars/people).


Lockheed and DOD say the F-35 costs $89.2 million/plane and will dip below $80 million/unit within the next couple years.

Not sure where they got the $89.2 million figure, and there’s no reason to expect that unit cost will fall below the $80 million mark. Three reasons:

1. Math

Cost per unit (FY2021): $144,303,797

2. Cost effectiveness

Cost effectiveness is a crude measure of a given unit’s ‘true’ cost used by a lot of defense analysts. The formula is basically this:

Cost effectiveness = cost per unit + (cost per unit x how dumb the unit is)

How dumb the thing is (in this narrow sense) is often discerned by looking at the rate at which the unit is “full mission capable” (FMC). I took the F-35A’s numbers to be charitable. 

^Source (GAO)

So: $144,303,797 + ($144,303,797 x .66) = $239,544,303/plane.

3. Other costs

There are tons of other factors to consider such as cost/flight hour ($44,000), maintenance costs (like spare parts), and research and testing ($55 billion in total, so far).

There’s also the F-35’s ‘sustainment’ costs. I’m not sure what the F-35’s sustainment costs are. Neither is Congress.

Conclusion

At present, the House supports the President’s F-35 request, and the Senate recommends adding 16 more (this happens a lot with defense procurement; i.e., Congress being part of the problem).

And I’ll only mention Lockheed’s CEO compensation last year ($24.4 million) because it adds an exclamation point to this form of class warfare.

Thanks for your time!

Stephen (stephen@securityreform.org; @stephensemler)

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How much does the F-35 actually cost?

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