The troubled $1.5 trillion F-35 program is not ready to begin the critical combat-testing phase, the Pentagon’s testing director said in a previously undisclosed August memo obtained by the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). That decision marks another setback in the development of the Pentagon’s largest acquisition program.
The memo, issued on August 24, 2018, says the program has not met the necessary entry criteria to begin the crucial combat-testing phase called Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E). It comes on the heels of the revelation, reported first by POGO, that program officials have been trying to make it appear as though the program has completed the development phase, by altering paperwork to reclassify potentially life-threatening design flaws to give the appearance of progress rather than actually fixing them.
https://www.pogo.org/investigation/2018 ... r-setback/While it is not clear from the memo which specific problems remain to be resolved, previous testing reports found “key technical deficiencies in the ability of the F-35 to employ the AIM-120 weapons” (the principle air-to-air missile) and an “uncharacterized bias toward long and right of the target” when pilots fire the aircraft’s cannon, resulting in them “consistently missing ground targets during strafe testing.”
