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Rear Admiral Craig Steidle is the director of the Joint Strike Fighter Program. He came to the program in January 1994 after spending four years managing the Navy's F-18 program, where he directed the development of the F-18E/F. A decorated Naval pilot, the admiral has flown over fifty different types of aircraft, among them the F-18, A-6, F-4, A-3, and H-2. He has accumulated over 3,600 flying hours in his flying career, including nighttime carrier-based missions over North Vietnam.

As the top military official in charge of the Joint Strike Fighter Program, the admiral visited Fort Worth in late January to attend the kickoff meeting of the JSF concept development phase. While in Fort Worth, he shared these thoughts on the JSF with the editor of LMTAS's Code One Magazine, Eric Hehs.

What is the importance of the JSF program to the US military?

It is vital. It is the most important program. It is our future. The Navy needs a first-day-of-the-war survivable strike fighter to complement the F-18E/F. The Air Force needs a replacement for its F-16s and A-10s. The Marine Corps needs a replacement for its AV-8Bs and F-18s. The Royal Navy needs a replacement for its Sea Harriers. These services have no alternatives to the JSF to fill these roles.

How is this program different from previous military aircraft programs?

An emphasis on affordability is the primary difference. Affordability accounts for the main reason we started the program. With the unit cost of airplanes increasing, we need to do business differently.

We are keeping costs low by getting warfighters and technologists together in the beginning of the program. You are helping us coordinate the cost and operational performance trades where we're asking questions like, How much does that last twenty percent of capability cost? Do I need it? Where are the knees in the curves for performance and capability? What advances will allow us to affordably achieve our goals? We have never taken this approach with a fighter before. We are doing all of our development up front and taking risk to the lowest level before we go to the next phase of the program, engineering and manufacturing development, or E&MD.

How are the interservice relationships working out?

Outstanding. My staff includes members of the Marines, Navy, Air Force, and UK personnel-civilians and military alike. When we perform the campaign analyses, we often wear civilian clothes. You can't tell who is in the Navy, Marine Corps, or Air Force. We have a great blend of people. We also have full support from the top down. That support makes a difference. Dr. William Perry (then Secretary of Defense) made the announcement for the downselect for this phase of the program. We received great support from him and from the service chiefs, military secretaries, and all the way down the chain of command.

I work for the assistant secretary of the Air Force. My deputy is an Air Force general. She will take over the program and will work for the assistant secretary of the Navy and then her deputy will be a Naval officer. My third in command is a senior Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. When I get briefings and discuss what is taking place here, everyone listens in-the Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and the British Royal Navy. The services are fully integrated across the board.

Is this interservice cooperation peculiar to the JSF program?

Joint-service programs are not completely new. You are seeing more cooperation across the board. JPATS, JDAM, JSOW all represent joint programs or joint ways of doing business. I can get you a long list of joint programs at the weapon level. JSF, however, is on a different scale. It is the largest joint acquisition program in the Department of Defense.

What makes an interservice approach more affordable?

Many of the services have similar requirements. Very simply, the only difference between JSF variants is how they will land and take off. The rest of the stuff in between, as well as the way we support and maintain the airplane, is all the same. Through commonality, we can reduce life-cycle cost, the cost of ownership.

Historically, the services have never fielded a successful interservice aircraft that was designed as such from the start. What circumstances induced the services to take a joint approach?

The cancellation of several other programs drove us to look for a more affordable solution. Unit cost for fighter aircraft continues to rise. This trend applies to every current fighter program, including the Gripen, Rafale, and the Eurofighter 2000. All of these weapon systems are becoming unaffordable to produce, develop, and maintain. We have to start doing things differently.

The most common negative comment I hear is that we tried this before with the F-111. But if you go back and research that program, it was very different. The F-111 was not a joint program. A single service led that program.

How can engineers and factory workers here prepare for, or help implement, some of the innovations required for this program?

Your leadership is very receptive to doing business differently. Everyone here seems willing to listen to how to reduce weight and how to increase reliability and durability. You are looking at new diagnostic methods and innovative ways of doing business. Every idea for improvement will be considered.

What are some of the biggest obstacles the program has to overcome and how are you dealing with them?

This next phase of the program, concept development, is an obstacle in itself. No one has ever built an operational supersonic STOVL strike fighter. We have to develop a propulsion system and fully integrate it in the airplane. Then we have to go fly it. We have to negotiate milestones and stick to them. We have to mitigate risks. These are not easy tasks. Everyone's plate is full.

What are your expectations for the current phase of the program?

I am ecstatic that we're now past the last phase of the program, which involved getting the funding in the right years, producing a request for proposals, and completing the source selection process. We have defined the processes and systems. Now we have to build the aircraft, which will be the most enjoyable part of the program. Three years from now, you will see this airplane out on the flight line. And we don't get to build new aircraft very often anymore. We have a lot of milestones between now and a first flight. But the ultimate test will come when we roll those airplanes out and take off.

Will the underlying assumptions justifying the projected cost of each variant be tested or proven during this phase of the program?

They will be tested and proven every day. You have proposed several aircraft affordability initiatives. You have some unique demonstrations and you have demonstrations peculiar to what we call the preferred weapon system concept or PWSC. These demonstrations will show that you can achieve the cost levels that you have proposed. We are primarily interested in the PWSC, that is the airplane that we will eventually take delivery of in 2008. Everything we do is geared to how that airplane performs, how much it weighs, and what it costs-not just unit cost, but the life-cycle cost of ownership.

Do a lot of these assumptions depend on government actions?

The government sets some of the parameters, like how many airplanes we are going to buy and how we are going to support them. We also share some of the pieces. We have been working together with industry on a joint common cost model. We have been establishing and discussing with industry the basic assumptions for this model.

Some of the pieces that define the requirements for JSF came from a campaign analyses. We used major regional conflicts that come from the Department of Defense. We actually ran campaign analyses and discovered deficiencies-material treatments, payload, range, and all the particular characteristics that define a weapon system. We shared those results with you and you responded with a proposed airplane that would solve the deficiencies. We have worked together.

How do production run and other factors relate to cost?

Cost and quantity curves flatten out at about 1,600 airplanes. You also have to consider a learning curve, which also becomes relatively flat after a period of time. Through affordability initiatives, though, we are lowering the learning curve to bring the initial cost down. Another aspect of overall cost is cost of ownership-what it costs to operate the airplane, the number of maintenance personnel required to support the airplane. These factors determine operation and support costs, and they are equally as important as production cost.

Does the program depend on any major breakthroughs in technology?

No. Since the E&MD phase of the program begins relatively soon, in 2001, the technologies have to be brought down to a low-risk point before the turn of the century. The biggest advances that we will see will come in the area of structures. But no new materials are involved. We are working with and will soon fly integrated subsystems.

In avionics, we are looking at an open system architecture, which has never been applied to a weapon system. As you probably know, companies that produce microprocessors are not going to produce military-specific processors anymore. This situation forces us to design systems that can use off-the-shelf processors. Technology is advancing so fast in this area that doing it the old way would leave us with obsolete systems. Also, the propulsion team is going to do a lot of work. Their efforts will be demonstrated in the next three years.

How do the services plan to reconcile planned procurement of the JSF (2008 timeframe) at over 100 aircraft per year with no assumed increases in military spending combined with other aircraft programs also entering the production phase?

We have to defend the President's budget every year. We are in a very good position, though. This program has fared very well because of its basic premise. It grew out of the unaffordability of other programs. So this program stands for doing business differently.

We're addressing requirements across the board, for four services. And we are seeing increased interest from our allies, in addition to the United Kingdom, in the program. In the future, we will see memorandums of understanding signed with Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, and Denmark.

How does the integration of foreign partners benefit them and the program itself?

Foreign military collaboration runs the range from the early integration of collaborative partners, like the United Kingdom, to the involvement of countries that are just interested in doing requirements validation. Having collaborative partners on board now is unique. Those relationships are working very well.

Other countries are interested in having us help them define their operational requirements so they can go to their parliaments and ministries of defense to propose programs for the future. They have to go through the same thought processes we do for acquiring new aircraft. They have to evaluate what they need in the year 2010 and how to justify those requirements. They have to trade off operational requirements and performance capabilities just like we do.

What is the public's perception of the JSF program?

Those people who are aware of what we are doing are generally very positive. I haven't received anything other than a positive response to what we are doing. Congressional staffs are positive. If a group gives me an opportunity to talk about what we are doing and why we are doing it, they are very receptive to the program by the end of my talk.