Gen Gates Wants 150+ more F-35s within 5 years

Most people who read Gen Gates Briefing on the budget and increasing F-35 production will point and say “He lied, they already wanted 30 in 2010”. What they did not do was their homework.

I almost fell for this argument, until I did some research.

According to the latest numbers (attached jpg) from this PDF the current buy is 355 over the next 5 years 2010-2014.

Gen Gates stated

Therefore, I will recommend increasing the buy of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter from the 14 aircraft bought in ’09 to 30 in FY ’10, with a corresponding funding increase from $6.8 billion to $11.2 billion. We would plan to buy 513 F-35s over the five-year defense plan, and ultimately plan to buy 2,443.

later in the Q&A section

Q The F-35 — you know, you talk on the one hand about wanting to reform that position process, but in accelerating that, didn’t the GAO warn recently that you’d be getting ahead of the testing on that and that that would put that program more at risk, to accelerate it?

SEC. GATES: Actually, what we’ve done, while we’re increasing the buy, we have taken a more cautious approach to the ramping-up of production over the course of the next five years. So we actually, in the five — I think I mentioned 513 aircraft by the end of the five-year defense plan. That’s actually, I think, several dozen aircraft fewer than the original planned buy.

To get to those numbers, he is basically moving the MY (Multi-Year) 2015 buy schedule ahead to mid 2012.