No, concurrence. 😀
Sincerely, when i see such discussions I always wonder if the people in USA are really aware of the existence of other nations in the world with their own air forces , aviation industries with their respective acquisition practises or even more paradoxically of the same USN and USMC air services.
Because if the choice of the development/production model have to be restricted between those two specular big FAILs, I feel a profound pity for american taxpayers.

So the alternatives are between a plane that took +20 years of development for a production run of eight than ended in a moment in which almost an half of the fleet was made by substandard items relegated in test, ANG and air reserve units and another one that even before the end of testing would produced in a superior number than the former?

Absurd. It’s like having someone forced to choose her own head of state between a serial bankrupt and ladykiller and a pathological liar…
:angel:

The Americans have a serious problem with their acquisition system. When it’s not one of their services that takes a bad decision it’s a politician, what a mess! Just the amount of money they waste on military acquisition would be enough to fund a pretty good small military.

Doesn’t matter that they hadn’t updated the plan because they did soon thereafter following the probation. They own the program (Pentagon, and Congress) and they get briefed on it regularly in the classified and non-classified setting. You can’t hit a NM breach and not know about serious issues a year or so earlier. Gates and the Congress used the F-35 as cover and thats about it. However, this is diversionary to the actual matter that was being discussed before you dragged the F-22 into all this.

I checked Panetta took office at the end of 2011. Maybe it was not too late to continue with the F-22, if it was not too late he should have reversed Gates decision.

The F-35 was one of the ‘excuses’ offered by the civilians and the politicos. Gates fought this all the way to the top, opposed by the USAF all along and ultimately the Senate voted to terminate the F-22 production. They knew how far they were into the F_35 development. By 2009 you had already started hearing of development troubles and later that year and by early 2010 there was already talk about an impending Nunn McCurdy breach.

They still had that pie in the sky ramp up with like 500 planes for 2015 or something like that. Talk about a disaster.

The DOD tracks total overall Concurrency bill for the Pentagon that includes only the cost paid by them i.e. the money they have to pay over and above. Following LRIP-5 many of the changes are split 50:50 with industry. The current estimate is $1.69 Billion for LRIP1 through LRIP-10 while this accounts for discoveries that took place in the 2013-2015 time-frame. Prior to these new discoveries the Pentagon anticipated a concurrency cost in excess of $2.5 Billion which was something wildly reported at the time. The current estimate was performed in 2015. Since then they have obviously come down and you will get better estimates the closer you are to the completion of testing. Do keep in mind that this is still a nearly $400 Billion acquisition program.

The contractor assumed 50% of the concurrency after LRIP 5, which is quite unusual AFAIK, but even at that the F-35 production should have been kept lower while producing more F-22s, had Gates not taken that moronic decision.

This has nothing to do with the point about ‘the right amount’ of concurrency. As Spud mentions above, the F-22 wasn’t cancelled by the USAF by by the civilians in the Pentagon, and the politicos. In fact the USAF strongly resisted it but were even denied the ability to purchase the few extra F-22’s they could under the $80 Billion cap the Congress had earlier set for the program. Once they demonstrated that they could buy more F-22’s within the 80 Billion cap than previously anticipated, the Congress quickly moved to put a cap on the numbers as opposed to the $ amount.

The F-35 was on the horizon and was used as an excuse. Concurrency had’nt even come into being since the process to cull the F-22 had been an ongoing battle the USAF had been fighting for many years prior to the event actually taking place.

Well I agree. But would they have stopped the F-22 if they hadn’t hoped that the F-35 would have been available quickly? Who convinced them, based on models, that it was all going to work piece of cake?

One could use this logic for practically anything but at the end they have to convince the services of all this and so far the wild assumptions on concurrency costs and changes haven’t materialized with the new number being signifiacntly less than what was originally thought and as mentioned earlier, being < 0.5% of the total acquisition cost.

AFAIK the retrofit costs were about 10 millions for the early blocks. Not insignificant. Comparing that to the total acquisition cost is rather dishonest, it makes it look very small, but when you take into account the enormity of the program it sums up to quite a lot.

Lets wait a few months once all weapons testing is complete. Perhaps then you’d want to see a video, or a report before you’ll believe.

If it doesn’t work let’s hope for the engineers will find a solution, right? What if they don’t?

You said some ‘concurrency’ is OK, I ask you to define that ‘some’. The F-22 does not come into this.

Let’s not sidestep this and bring the F-22 into the question because the F-35 concurrency has virtually nothing to do with its termination.

No no no no, the F-22 was cancelled because they thought the F-35 was going to ramp up really fast. The USAF would never have stopped procuring F-22 if they had nothing else to put in production.

Say for instance that the IOC had been delayed to 2020. Following your logic, it would have been fine to build like 400 F-35s that would have been good for nothing, because huh there is no problem with concurrency. So you have 400 planes waiting on the tarmac for years and years.

Also you don’t know in advance how much concurrency you will get before you’ve tested the plane, unless you’re close to the end of the development you’re just guessing.

NO they are testing it, and the tests would be required to have been completed prior to declaring the said capability operational just as it was the case prior to releasing block 2B/3I to the operational fleet. So there goes the argument about not testing it.

They are testing it for the good reason that they’re not sure it will work based only on the models, that’s the whole point. As long as they don’t test the AMRAAM release from the 2 internal stations in the most stringent situations, they won’t know if it really works, as simple as that. It MIGHT work, yes absolutely, but there will be a part of luck if it does.

As mentioned above, the capability will be TESTED prior to being released to the fleet and the weapons testing is likely to wrap up in the next few months.

Lol, I think I’m talking to a wall…

The F-22 was required to meet a certain set of criteria prior to IOC, that were no doubt in line with what it needed as part of that IOC. Similarly, the F-35 was required to demonstrate and be certified to do what the USMC and USAF required for IOC. The same will be true for Block 3F with SDD weapons testing likely to wrap up in the coming months. Therefore the two things are entirely the same, the only difference being in what constituted IOC for each aircraft.

Then people should not claim that the F-35 block 2B/3I will be able to be upgraded to use its 4 AMRAAMs in all conditions, because it’s not been proven that they’ll really be able to make it work, huh.

According to your opinion, what concurrency cost is OK?

That’s a complicated question. The F-35 is not alone in a vaccuum. When you have a plane that is in production and highly capable, ie the F-22, that changes the analysis of whether you should start buying a lot of another plane that won’t be able to do anything for years.

Also the USAF got just a small number of F-22s. If at least they had built many of them stopping the production would have been more understandable. The F-22 was also not so expensive at the end, this has to be taken into account also.