Mark Thompson, 2/9/22
Only in the U.S. military would the wholesale junking of the key support system of the most expensive weapons system in the history of the world be cause for celebration. Yet that’s precisely what the Pentagon folks running the tri-service F-35 program did February 1. “Maintenance milestone for the F-35 fleet!” they said (free Bunker advice: be wary when the Pentagon starts using exclamation marks!). “Due to the diligent work by the F-35 Joint Program Office and Lockheed Martin,” they added, initial replacement hardware to keep the F-35 flying was “fielded on time and within budget in January.” The new gear is “75% smaller and lighter” than the old stuff, the F-35 program office said, “and was procured at nearly 30 percent lower cost.”
This is the military’s equivalent of asking: “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”
That’s because the F-35’s original logistics support system—Autonomic Logistics Information System (acronym ALIS, as in Wonderland)—is so bad that commanders have been ignoring its “not-ready-to-fly” alerts. The Pentagon is now replacing it with the new Operational Data Integrated Network (acronym ODIN, like the Norse god of war). Both were/are designed by Lockheed, the F-35’s builder and the Defense Department’s #1 contractor (in dollars, not quality). The Pentagon plans to buy a 2,456 fleet of F-35s for $400 billion. It would cost $1.2 trillion more (PDF) to fly those planes through 2070. The chance of the U.S. spending that much money, on that many planes, is the same as the U.S. winning the war in Afghanistan.
ALIS was supposed to be a data-sucking network that would allow F-35 maintainers to monitor each $160 million aircraft (PDF) in near-real time. It would basically let them know, in advance, when oil and tire changes were due, and parts had to be replaced (and no, this isn’t the F-35’s only spare-parts snafu). But ALIS was plagued “by outdated technology, false alarms, laborious data entry requirements, and clumsy interfaces.” That eye-watering assessment is from Air Force Magazine, a leading cheerleader for the service, which is slated to buy about 70% of the Pentagon’s F-35s (the Marines and Navy also fly the plane).
ALIS funneled all of its data through a single conduit and computer “with no backup system or redundancy,” the Government Accountability Office warned in a 2016 report. “If either of these fail, it could take the entire F-35 fleet offline.” And it was heavy. ALIS computers “weigh approximately 200 pounds and require at least two people to lift.” Several would have to be deployed to foreign hotspots along with their F-35s and would “need a whole room to operate,” the GAO noted in a March 2020 report. “It can be hard to find a place to store them on a ship,” where both Marine and Navy F-35s are based. Not the most agile piece of hardware. Things got so bad that commanders have ignored ALIS alerts that their F-35s are unsafe to fly, the GAO said (PDF) in July 2020.
Of course, the Defense Department didn’t get into such details when it announced ODIN’s roll-out to replace “the legacy ALIS computer hardware.” But only the Pentagon can abandon a projected $16.7 billion “legacy” system at the heart of a jet fighter—a jet fighter that has yet to be approved for full-scale production—and peddle it as progress.