Criticizing people and the government through Twitter is easy. Actually governing and making important decisions, often based on conflicting information, is much more difficult. President-elect Donald Trump will soon learn this. The F-35 fighter program may provide one of the first lessons.
“The F-35 program and cost is out of control,” Trump tweeted last week. “Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th,” he added, referring to Inauguration Day.
The F-35, fighter jets made to evade detection, offer a lesson in the complexity of military procurement. The fighter jet has been plagued with technical problems. Software glitches have caused radar on the jets to fail. One of the jets caught fire in September during training exercises in Idaho. Engine fires in 2014 grounded the entire F-35 fleet. Contractors, including Pratt & Whitney in Maine, say the problems have been fixed.
The jets, made for the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, have cost nearly twice as much as early estimates.
Because the military put so much faith — and time and money — into the F-35, it can’t easily change course and buy a different type of fighter jet, even if it should. It has shut down programs to build other types of jets that will be replaced by the F-35.
And, here’s one of the most important reasons it would be difficult for Trump to end or dramatically change the F-35 procurement plan: Its manufacture provides jobs to thousands of Americans, including nearly 1,000 people in Maine. Making jets involves 32,500 jobs in 46 states — only Hawaii, Alaska, Wyoming and Nebraska don’t benefit from the $400 billion contract, according to Business Insider.
Because jobs related to the F-35 are spread across the country, there are hundreds of members of Congress who will fight to keep the program going. A president would have a hard time overcoming this support — and the Pentagon’s plans — unless he had an especially strong case for making changes.
In Maine, engine components for the jets are made at the Pratt & Whitney plant in North Berwick. Other parts are made by General Dynamics at a facility in Saco. The F-35 program injects $84 million into the state each year and provides direct and indirect jobs to 960 Mainers, the Portland Press Herald reported on Sunday.
The F-35 work in southern Maine generated so much demand for precision machinists that York County Community College in Wells created a program in 2013 to train them, the paper reported.
“That contract provides security for Pratt & Whitney and literally hundreds of jobs for people who wake up and go to work every day to provide for their families,” former Maine House Speaker Mark Eves, who lives in North Berwick, told the Press Herald. “If it were to go away, it would be pretty devastating for people’s ability to bring home a good paycheck.”
There are no doubt many changes that need to be made to military procurement. But clever tweets won’t replace the hard work of understanding the broad reach of contracts and how improvements that can gain the support of Congress can be made.
