At this year’s Modern Day Marine exposition held last month in Washington, DC, outgoing Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Berger made headlines about his concerns with the direction of joint operations between the military services.
One such headline from Marine Corps Times featured prominently on Yahoo Finance said it all: “U.S. Joint Forces lack a ‘common goal’ for the future, says top Marine.”
While it’s true that the services must do better moving forward, some major challenges they face are “above their pay grade” and also outside the chain of command, cutting across lanes of authority between the Defense Department, Congress and defense industry.
Perhaps the best example of this type of problem is a years-long effort to make changes to the propulsion system of the F-35, a.k.a. Joint Strike Fighter. While upgrades to existing aircraft engines have been standard since the Wright Brothers invented modern flight, one proposal that has been making headlines is switching the current F135 engine for an entirely new system called the Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP) on the same airframe, representing a radically different approach.
More importantly, such a change would also effectively take the “joint” out of the Joint Strike Fighter because the AETP is only designed for the Air Force version, the F-35A used in conventional runways. Both the Marine Corps and Navy have made it clear that this new engine wouldn’t work in the F-35B used by the Marine Corps for vertical and/or short take off and landings (V/STOL), and might only possibly work with major modifications for the F-35C, the Navy’s version for launch and recovery from aircraft carriers. The Air Force alone would also have been on the hook to pay for it.
Even though the Air Force’s top official, Secretary Frank Kendall publicly affirmed earlier this year his decision to upgrade the existing F135 with an Engine Corps Upgrade (ECU) based on affordability, other major players in Washington still haven’t let the issue go.
For instance, the House Armed Services Committee still included a proposed roughly $600 million for AETP in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2024. That’s a lot of taxpayer money to spend on something the military already declined. The services, operating jointly, could find a lot better uses for it. Addressing severe problems in recruiting and combating a suicide epidemic quickly come to mind.
"Speaking at the Potomac Officers Club this month, Secretary Kendall noted that if Congress mandates the continuation of AETP, he worries other programs would suffer cuts to pay for it. And his comment, "as often happens, the Hill doesn't want to let it go," was a fitting description of the problem."
Beyond the government’s internal tussles, the U.S. defense industry is also battling over the F-35 engine replacement. Since the mid-2000s when the F-35 made its debut, manufacturer Lockheed Martin and F135 engine producer Pratt & Whitney have been together in a marriage over the fifth-generation fighter. However, to the surprise of many in the industry, recent comments by Lockheed have raised some eyebrows.
Speaking with Breaking Defense last month, Greg Ulmer, Lockheed’s executive vice president of aeronautics, supported AETP as the alternative engine for the F-35. His comments appeared to surprise Pratt& Whitney while also undermining the Pentagon’s intention to upgrade the F135 engine. Ulmer seemed to boost General Electric Aerospace, which has been pushing for a dozen years to fund a replacement engine on which it could then bid to build.
In response, Pratt executives didn’t mince words. Jeff Shockey, senior vice president of global government relations for RTX, Pratt & Whitney’s parent company remarked, “Lockheed proposing AETP for the F-35 undermines the customer, the taxpayer and the warfighter.” Jen Latka, who leads Pratt’s F135 program, said Ulmer’s remarks were “very confusing and misleading.”
If AETP does ultimately replace the F135 engines, the Marine Corps would be the worst impacted of all three U.S. services plus over a dozen allied countries which fly F-35s as part of a direct partnership and foreign military sales. While they all would be forced into multiple supply and logistics chains to maintain their F-35 fleets, old and new versions, the Marines fly both F-35Bs and F-35Cs to better integrate with Navy operations at sea. In fact, last month the Marine Corps announced the self-deployment of an F-35C Squadron across the Pacific -- from Miramar, California to Darwin, Australia, an impressive 7,800 mile trip.
AETP would inevitably leave the Marines behind as new technology and new supply chains will focus on the Air Force F-35As first, and the Marine versions last. That’s no way to improve joint operations, quite the opposite. General Berger had it right; our services must do better in the future along these lines. Yet they also need some help with those above their pay grade and outside of their chains of command.
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