WASHINGTON: The US military downplayed concerns it could cancel the F-35 fighter and a new stealth bomber, after leaked documents from a budget review suggested the programmes might be eliminated as one way to deal with deep budget cuts.
Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said on Wednesday that finding $500bn in budget cuts required by law over the next decade, on top of $487bn in cuts already being implemented, required tough trade-offs between the size of the military and high-end weapons programs.
Pentagon briefing slides shown to various groups mapped out those trade-offs in stark terms, indicating that a decision to maintain a larger military could result in the cancellation of the $392bn Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 programme and a new stealthy, long-range bomber, according to several people who saw the slides.
Defence officials later stressed there were no plans to kill either programme, noting that dismantling the F-35 programme in particular would have far-reaching consequences for the US military services and 10 foreign countries involved in the programme, which is already in production.
“We have gone to great lengths to stress that this review identified, through a rigorous process of strategic modelling, possible decisions we might face, under scenarios we may or may not face in the future,” Pentagon Spokesman George Little said.
“Any suggestion that we’re now moving away from key modernisation programmes as a result of yesterday’s discussion of the outcomes of the review would be incorrect,” he said.
Analysts said Hagel and other Pentagon officials appeared to be leaning toward the option that would emphasise high-end weapons programs over force size.
Mackenzie Eaglen, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said suggestions that the F-35 programme “was being targeted was either an oversight or a scare tactic, but it wasn’t a serious proposition that the entire program would be cancelled under any circumstances”.
She said failure by Congress to reverse deep budget cuts could result in the F-35 programme being slowed or scaled back, but outright cancellation was unlikely given the huge investment already made in the new warplane, which is designed to replace over a dozen planes in use around the world.
“Cancelling the programme would be detrimental to our national defense,” said the official, noting that the US Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps needed to replace aging fleets of fighter planes that were increasingly expensive to maintain.
Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, cited estimates that it would cost four times the amount needed to buy new F-35s to keep the current force flying. And cutting the planned bomber would generate very little savings since the programme — which could eventually cost around $30bn - is in the early stages at this point, he said.
Reuters
