Mary-Louise Hoffman
Christopher Bogdan, head of the F-35 Joint Program Office, has said the organization has developed a framework to sustain F-35 fighter jets and boost competition globally, Defense News reported Sunday.
Aaron Mehta writes that JPO plans to group the F-35 user base into North America, Europe and Pacific regional categories and evaluate required sustainment work in each region.
“We’re trying to build in a system that provides enough flexibility while at the same time gaining the synergy of everyone sticking together,” Bogdan told Defense News.
Bogdan believes the strategy could also lead to steady job gains and generate cost savings on a global scale, according to Mehta’s article.
Defense News reports the JPO plans to assign sustainment roles under the F-35 program and a selected country would have guaranteed share of maintenance business for that nation’s fighter jet fleet.
The office is also considering an “eye-level” option that would help U.S. military services maintain an F-35 at the unit level instead of shipping the aircraft back to a depot, Mehta writes.
“We have done some studying and from an operational perspective, some eye-level capability probably affords the sea services some operational advantage, and if it turns out that there is a cost to doing that that would be their decision as to whether the benefit is worth that cost,†Bogdan added, according to Defense News.
Hal Chrisman, a vice president at ICF International, forecasts that the market for F-35 sustainment could increase from its current value of $122 million to $1.9 billion by 2022.
