(Bloomberg) -- Lockheed Martin Corp. is on track to meet its goal of delivering at least 100 F-35 jets to the US military this year, according to the Pentagon’s contract management agency, even as the costliest US weapons system is under attack from billionaire Elon Musk.
The F-35 deliveries, which may total as many as 110 of the fighter jets, will be a blend of new planes off the assembly lines and 66 previously withheld aircraft that still lack upgrades to their software and hardware, the Defense Contract Management Agency said in a statement to Bloomberg News.
None of the backlogged aircraft have been rejected for quality reasons, but the contract management agency said it “will continue to review Lockheed Martin Aeronautics quality actions.”
It’s a step forward for Lockheed and the F-35, which has a $486 billion total acquisition price tag. Musk, an adviser on cost-cutting to President-Elect Donald Trump, has said that “some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35” in an age of drones.
Outgoing Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall defended the aircraft Thursday while also chiding Lockheed Martin’s performance in building it.
“The F-35 isn’t going away” as it’s “a state of the art system that’s continuously being upgraded,” Kendall said during an Air Force Association webcast. “There’s a reason so many countries are buying the F-35,” he said of its 19 international customers. “There is no alternative to that in the near term. We should continue to buy it.”
But “we need better performance out of Lockheed, quite honestly,” in terms of delivering “what they’ve been promising” in capability, he said, and costs aren’t being driven down fast enough.
“I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk as an engineer.” Kendall added. “He’s not a warfighter, and he needs to learn a little bit more about the business, I think, before he makes such grand announcements as he did.”
The F-35’s continued problems were signaled in August, when the Pentagon said it was withholding about $5 million in final payments for each F-35 that didn’t yet have the software and hardware upgrade, known as TR3. At 66 planes, that’s about $330 million in withheld payments at year’s end.
The Defense Department and Lockheed Martin have agreed on incremental milestones the contractor can reach next year to earn some of the withheld payments until the hardware and software upgrades are proven and validated.
Lockheed Martin said in a statement that “we are proud of the joint government and industry team that has worked to efficiently deliver F-35s in 2024 while maintaining the highest levels of quality.”
The $884 billion compromise defense authorization bill that’s passed Congress for President Joe Biden’s signature authorizes production of all 68 jets requested by the Pentagon for the current fiscal year but would bar acceptance of 20 of them until the defense secretary submits plans to rectify development issues with the aircraft.
Musk, whose SpaceX has become a major Pentagon contractor, wrote last month in a post on X, the social network he owns, that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway. Will just get pilots killed.”
The post linked to a Bloomberg News story that detailed the jet’s reliability and security woes as disclosed in the declassified version of the Pentagon’s capstone test report used to validate the program going into full-rate production in March.
Two possible targets for the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency to be headed by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy might be to cut the Pentagon’s long-established objective of buying 2,470 F-35s or slow the planned award of the next contract for as many as 290 more of the warplanes.
--With assistance from Roxana Tiron.
(Updates with additional Kendall on Musk, in eighth paragraph.)
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