JSF Concurrency

The FY2013 budget highlights summary posted on www.finance.hq.navy.mil contains the following quote:

“JSF reduced by 69 airframes over the FYDP (ed.note:  that’s the five year period 2013-2017 inclusive) to pay for concurrency and reduce need for future modifications.”

Regular readers know that the practice of concurrency, whereby a ship or plane is built while its design is still being developed, is one of the major causes of cost and schedule overruns.  With this budget document, the cost of concurrency hits home with the loss of 69 airframes to pay for the associated concurrency costs.  Do the math.  Multiply 69 airframes times the cost of single plane (say $100M – could be more depending on what source you want to believe) and you come up with the concurrency cost.  Yikes!  And this doesn’t even count the concurrency costs previously incurred.  Despite the overwhelming evidence of the stupidity and wastefulness of concurrency, the Navy remains firmly committed to the practice.