F-35 Stealth Fighter Still Has 419 ‘Deficiencies,’ Manager Says

The head of the U.S. Defense Department’s F-35 program said the number of “deficiencies” in the stealth fighter jet’s hardware and software is decreasing but that hundreds of technical challenges remain.

Speaking to reporters last week in his offices in Arlington, Virginia, Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan discussed a range of issues affecting the Pentagon’s biggest weapons program at nearly $400 billion, including the hundreds of lingering deficiency reports, or DRs, known as “technical debt” in acquisition parlance.

“There are 419 things that we have yet to decide with the war fighters how we’re going to fix them, whether we’re going to fix them and when we’re going to fix them,” he said. The figure was three times higher a few years ago and “we think the technical debt that we have — the deficiencies that we have — are things that we can handle … within the next two years,” he said.

U.S. Colleges Infected by Foreign Spies: FBI

“Placing academics at U.S. research institutions under the guise of legitimate research offers access to developing U.S. technologies and cutting-edge research” in such areas as information systems, lasers, aeronautics and underwater robots, the report said.

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Enabling China

Over the years, American universities have enabled China “to leapfrog into the cutting edge of military capability on the way to superpower status,” Richard Fisher, senior fellow on Asian Military Affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Alexandria, Virginia, said in an e-mail.

Chen Dingchang, the head of a Chinese military-sponsored working group on anti-satellite technology, led a delegation in 1998 to the University of Florida to learn about diamond-coating manufacturing, used in missile seekers and other systems, said Mark Stokes, executive director of the Project 2049 Institute in Arlington, Virginia, which studies Chinese aerospace technology. In a 1999 report in a Chinese journal, the authors, including Chen, said the university’s cooperation would assist in overcoming a technical bottleneck in China’s development of anti-satellite warheads.

Full article: U.S. Colleges Infected by Foreign Spies: FBI (Bloomberg Businessweek)