A US$14 billion Pentagon software upgrade for F-35 jets is being installed on aircraft that are deployed although it is “immature, deficient and insufficiently tested,” a new assessment by the military’s testing office said.
Aircraft operators “identified deficiencies in weapons, fusion, communications and navigation, cybersecurity and targeting processes that required software modification and additional time and resources, which caused delays,” the 13-page assessment in the testing office’s annual report said.
Built by Lockheed Martin, the F-35 is a flying computer, with more than 8 million lines of computer code, and the software needed to increase its capabilities has been marred by problems since deliveries of the upgrades began in 2020.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The US Department of Defense’s F-35 program office has implemented “process improvements to address software development issues,” the assessment said.
The F-35 section of the annual report, which has circulated inside the Pentagon for comment, is a combination of unclassified and “controlled, unclassified information.”
Laura Seal, spokeswoman for the defense department’s F-35 program office, said that the office would issue comments once the report is officially released.
Although the program office designed the upgrade effort around commercial “agile software” concepts, “it does not adhere to the published best practices,” and it has “consistently failed to deliver the capabilities contained in their master schedule,” said the assessment, which was conducted under the agency’s new Operational Test and Evaluation Director Nickolas Guertin.
“The program has not sufficiently funded” teams to “adequately test, analyze data or perform comprehensive” checkup analysis “to assure that unintentional deficiencies are not embedded in the software prior to delivery,” the testing office said in the assessment.
As a result, the process has resulted in frequent “discoveries of critical warfighting deficiencies after fielding to the combat units.”
Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed has delivered more than 750 of a potential 3,300 jets to the US and partners. They are in operation in nine nations, including South Korea, the UK and Israel.
The Block 4 software upgrade has a new processor to increase the computing power and memory of the F-35. The upgrade is also intended to allow the fighters to carry new AIM-9X Block II air-to-air missiles, all-weather Small Diameter Bomb II munitions, radar-killing AARGM-ER missiles, several allied-produced bombs and the B-61 nuclear bomb.
So far, it has not worked out that way.
“Although designed to introduce new capabilities or fix deficiencies, the process has often introduced stability problems and/or adversely affected” other functions, with training and military units finding deficiencies, the assessment said.
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